Fun with a few 9V batteries. (244 of them)

So I needed a break from working on a project again, and I remembered that I had a bunch of 9V batteries and thought, ‘I wonder if that would be enough voltage to hold an arc?‘. The answer is yes, it would. So I made a little video of melting some alligator clips and crispifying some LED’s, a CD, and a cap. Or at least trying to blow up the cap, that was one tough cookie..

I used 244 9V batteries, that were not new, but not dead. When you do the math, this should be 2,196 Volts, but that is when they are new. I measured (in blocks) 2,000 volts total. Lots of sparky..

DISCLAIMER:

Do not try this at home. You might get shocked. I am not responsible for anything or anyone that gets damaged if you try to recreate this. Again, just to be clear, do not try this at home. Ever.

Thanks, yeah I was real careful about wire routing and clearance with those jumpers knowing I was a few volts past the rating. I actually did a lot of careful testing in stages and worked up from 400 volts in an effort not to get buzzed. Thanks for the comment!

It’s not a matter of getting “buzzed.” You are fooling around with roughly the same amount of energy that powers an electric chair, and you don’t appear to have much of a clue as to where the real hazards lie. This is a pretty scary video on multiple levels.

Because death from electrocution does not correlate to how much voltage is going through the body but rather how much current is. Because the body can handle up to 1 amp of current, he would have needed a minimum of 2.196 kiloohms of resistance going through the circuit to make the circuit not kill him, and a 2.2 kiloohm resistor is very easy to find, though to make sure that the resistor didn’t fry, he would have probably wanted to use a 20 megaohms resistor if he had a 1/4 watt one, or he could have used 8,784 1/4-watt, 1/4 ohm resistors.

Actually, I didn’t watch the video before making the comment. Actually, what probably happened was that he had his hand far enough away that the spark didn’t hit him. Also, wires have resistance in them, but it’s probably not enough for him to be able to withstand the current that he would have endured had he touched the batteries while doing this.

No, it still should have fried. I don’t know what fried capacitors look like, but there should have been something because the insulator should have broken down so that current would go through it. I don’t have an explanation about why it would not have exploded.

Drop them in a wasteland and short-circuit it (what a waste of money, isn’t?). What could happen? A chain reaction exploding all, one by one or just the batteries with higher charging level would explode?

If, by “wasteland” you mean a bunch of muck and mud, then no, none of them would explode.
If you are talking about soil that has a lot of iron in it, very few (if any) would have any contact between the terminals.
If you dropped one in water, all that would happen is bubbles will form on the terminals, more on one side than the other.

If I calculated the internal resistance of a rechargeable 9V sized battery correctly, it’s around 5 so short circuiting it would draw at least 1 A. Since you are using partially discharged alkaline batteries, the current would be lower.
50 mA can stop the heart. Wet skin has 1k of resistance and in this experiment, you are likely to sweat a bit. For this resistance value, 50 volts is needed to drive 50 mA through wet skin.